It also says that the earth has corners (and thus must be a polygon) _and_ a disc.
A reference for such arguements can be found
at http://www.talkorigins.org which links to almost all of the falks of the talk.origins newsgroup.
---
RobK
Re:can Windows be beaten on the desktop?
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 2
Well. Let's see. I use NT every day at work.
It simply does not have the kind of stability for me to lay out that kind of money (anything over $100 had better be worth it, since I can get a fairly stable OS for free).
However my wife wants windows, so we get the consumer version to save a buck.
In my book NT4 is not incomparably better. It is better. But from my experience the diference in the down time (a factor of about (nt crashes/98 crashes)~1.5) does not
justify the difference in price (about ~2 or more). [Same hardware with same software installed]. ---
RobK
Why are you expecting masses of spangly new goodness? Because MS expects me to lay out a
significant chunk of change for them.
Nothing major has been added (IE could be installed seperately) because nothing major was missing (or broken (to be polite) like the linux VM) in the first place
Hmmmm, let's see stabilty and security were definately missing in my book.
Finally:Yes, the old VM wasn't that hot. But look at it this way. With Linux I get my bugfixes/redesigns for free, with MS I have to lay out $89+ every year to two years for them.
Plus, With Linux, if it's broke, I can fix the durned thing myself.
It doesn't take a economist to figure this one out. There is a large value to being free. ---
RobK
Name 10 improvements from NT3.51-Win2000(this one is much, much easier)
These have to be substation improvements, like the ones the original poster pointed out for Linux.
(in other words "Supports USB" doesn't cut it). ---
RobK
These changes definately needed to be made. I'm a long time VB developer, and there are many, many issues in VB that need to be fixed. I do think the timing is poor, user tolerance with MS is very low right now. (Personally, I've been trying to get out of the VB trap for a while.)
Points 1-4 already exist in Java, as many other people have already pointed out.
The remaining issues are only of interest if you already have a lot invested in those very specific technologies. And for that matter, you have to balance the ASP improvements vs. the through trashing they gave VB. Very basic VB concepts (like variants) no longer work under VB.Net, which will prevent a lot of people from "upgrading." (my source on this is the VB.Not homepage which was taken down, but may still be accessible via google's cache. The VB.Not homepage was started by a MS MVP, and apparently he may have been pressured to take it down.)
To me.Net looks worse than a wash, you gain a little by using it,but lose even more. Infact, you might want to hire some coders to move you vb apps to say.... java since you'd have to re-write them anyway, and previous versions of VB won't be supported for very long.
[All of this was garnered from various articles on C|Net, linuxtoday and/., if I am inadvertently spreading FUD, I apologize. Please post polite corrections, thank you.] ---
RobK
Yes, but look at the stellar heights that
they were at. There was no sane reason that VA should have been trading at 900%+ it's IPO price. Even the most pro-MS(and pro-Linux) analysts have conceded that this is a normal stock adjustment for a stock that was majorly overvalued.
In other words, wait another year and the prices will bounce back up.
It is also highly unlikely that it's only linux stocks that have dropped that much. In a bear market like this, the price drops will fall along a bell curve. You might want to go to your library and check out a few books on how the stock market works. It's not nearly as simple as you seem to think.
While currently all of Microsoft's competitors are doing poorly (look at Apple stock!), that clearly is an indication that wall street sees Microsoft as the "safer" bet. As opposed to two years ago when they were seen as the _only_ safe bet in the tech industry. The anti-trust trial, Linux, the resurgance of Apple, the newly found balls at Sun and Oracle all have made the entire tech industry seem like less of a sure bet. Currently there is no clear "winner", even though it is very obvious that for the first time in 25 years, MS is on the defensive. Linux of course would seem the least safe bet because no body has tried to make money this way before. Given the untested business plan (from wall street's perspective) and the bearish market, I'm suprised Linux stocks aren't trading lower!
A statement like yours belies a total lack of maturity. There are a great deal of analogies I could make but the all boil down to this.... History has shown time and time again that pre-judging large groups of people is not mature.
Oh yeah, and Hotmail runs off Exchange now. But I guess a 1,000 user network is probably way bigger than that.
And would you perchance know how many boxes they've added to withstand the load? Or what the average uptime for the hotmail boxes was before the transition or after? Or whether the users feel their user experience has improved as a result of the transition to Exchange?
A statement such as this is meaningless unless you take into account the resources, stability and user exerpeince. If MS spent $5M to transition over, brought in 5,000 boxes, add 150% to their IT staff and the user experience stayed the same, then the exchange transition is a failure. Plain and simple. If on the other hand, they used fewer boxes, the system became more stable and the user experience remained the same, it would be a success.
The fact is that we don't know and microsoft isn't telling. ---
RobK
Hmmmm...
I remember when I went to the "training seminar" [a misnomer, it was a marketing pitch] for
Visual InterDev 1.0 in Pittsburgh, the Microsoft speaker swore up and down that activex, MTS, and ASP support was "just around the corner" for solaris, linux and macintosh....
While they may have straightened up, I would take such claims with a large grain of salt. ---
RobK
However, since you posted this,
the gap continues to narrow according
to CNN. Gore has been "finding"
votes even in heavily republican counties.
Now you can argue that it's just that
democrats are stuffing the ballots faster
than republicans... Which frankly
is what I think is going on. Personally
given all the accusations on both sides each
state that was with 10,000 votes should
re-cast their ballots. It would probably
cost Gore the election, but I think it's only
fair.
You can view the by county results at
foxnews.com that bastion of the liberal press.
One of the counties published a +400 for Gore because one of the the official forgot to count 400+ votes on election night.
It has since been retracted. (The county apparently wants to make sure that these 400+ votes didn't appear in a questionable manner). It looks like the editor saw one article(to create the headline) but the retraction forced them to change the content....
Have you taken advantage of the multi-threaded TCP/IP stack? The USB support? The improved VM?
To say that this isn't helping those who choose
to run Linux at home is riduculous. That's
like saying that rack-and-pinion suspension
or power steering has no place in a consumer car.
Look at the feature list, if it's not what you want... keep running 2.2 or BSD or Mac or Windows or whatever. But the way it stands now, you better change your clothes, because your ignorance is showing. ---
RobK
What?
I use windows, mac and linux. I was
addressing a specific point that this
person made. I made a _suggestion_ because
s/he see,ed to be looking for something.
I was trying to help. I am not a zealot,
just a good samaritian. If you can't
understand, then maybe you
should point the zealot accusation elsewhere.
Because SPAM is much more intrusive
than a TV add.
Each message comes in and takes a small part
of your hard-drive space and time. It would
as each producer of each tv ad came into
your house and took a single grape and a single small slice of cheese.
While each grape or slice of cheese doesn't cost much, the collective mountain of foodstuffs
would be quite expensive.
I added up the sum of the cose of HD space and
time I wasted on spam once (took an average week and projected it out over a year). It came to
something like 1 day(deleting my junk folder repeatedly) and about $15,000(obviously the space was deleted and reused) in HD space.....
And I'm very careful who get's my home address. (I have about 3 different spam addresses though.) ---
RobK
4) Freebsd and the like make heavy inroads in the server area. I'm still waiting for a distro of linux to install on a server that doesn't require gigs of drive space. Yea, I know you can do min installs and then install what you need, but xxxBSD just seems cleaner to install. And you have to love the ports.
Have you heard of ZIPslack? It a Slackware. It's designed to be loaded from a zip drive. I think that will satisfy your needs.
RobK ---
RobK
Re:More than a couple:
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 2
How the _hell_ is this
off topic? I was directly
responding to the arguements
the guy put forward.
It's too late now(no one is reading
this thread) but that is pure
unabashed bullshit. ---
RobK
USB and Firewire solve different
problems. Much like serial
and parrallel, they are not in competition.
If you need high speed DV access, use firewire.
If you need low speed(relatively) access to
printers, mice, keyboards, scanners or removable media, use usb.
I don't see any point where the two over lap. So
in that case saying USB is "kicking the crap" out
of firewire is like saying "serial is kicking the
crap out of parrallel."
And btw, as others have pointed out neither
is free speech or free beer. ---
RobK
Re:More than a couple:
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
Gee, compare that to the number
of Christians that died/commited
suicide at Jonestown.
Does that prove that Christianity(sp? sorry,
I'm not Christian) is eeeeveeel? No, it proves that in any large group
there will be a mentally unstable
sub-group that may do things the
larger group will call reprehensible.
BTW, do you have references for all
of those deaths? Newspaper articles, anything?
I'd be interested in seeing how avid they really were. ---
RobK
Re:We both know there is more to D & D than that..
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 2
Many? There have been one or
two reported cases, of
previously distrubed individuals
commiting henious acts.
However, there has never been
any conclusive proof that occurences
of said sort are higher in the role-playing
community than amongst the regulars. There
have been a few studies that show a lower
occurance of violence amongst role-players...
but they did have some questionable aspects
to them.
Even for those few sick individuals who
did commit some horrible act, you can
not that they would or wouldn't
have done these things w/o exposure to
role-playing games.
It may be considered the height of objectivity that
you as a conservative find NPR to liberal while
I has a "card-carrying" liberal find it to conservative.
That's usually a good sign of objectivity.
RobK ---
RobK
Re:Linux Torvalds has been working on Crusoe linux
on
HURD For 'Big Iron'?
·
· Score: 2
Linus turns down _lots_ of patches. Lots and lots and lots of patches.... some of them end up being
part of commercial distros anyway.
I can fully understand him not accepting patches that are going to end up being a _lot_ of work to satisfy less the 1% of his "customers." [either as a maintainance issue or initial reworking of the infrastructure.] In terms of effort spent, it may simply not be worth it when the people who make these machines can easily make their own kernel. People have (for example) been using the devfs patch for quite a while and it only just got into the kernel in 2.4. I don't remember any conspiracy theories about any of the thousands of other patches Linus turned down...
Also, it could just be that the thought it was too late in the 2.4 development cycle for such a big addition.......
---
RobK
Re:Linux Torvalds has been working on Crusoe linux
on
HURD For 'Big Iron'?
·
· Score: 2
Give me some facts to back this up please. I'm
not interested in your random assertions.
I gave you some places to start looking for what the
thought process is on the kernel mailing lists.
If you really believe this, why don't you fork the
code and maintain a big iron kernel on your own?
It's your right under the GPL and there is nothing Linus could possibly do to stop you. _If_ this is Linus goal (which I don't believe for an instant... I think it's much more likely you have some kind of agenda), we can just say "So Long and Thanks for all the Code" to Linus and take Linux back. That is the beauty of Open Source code....
Slashdot Mirror
It also says that the earth has corners (and thus must be a polygon) _and_ a disc.
A reference for such arguements can be found
at http://www.talkorigins.org which links to almost all of the falks of the talk.origins newsgroup.
---
RobK
Well. Let's see. I use NT every day at work.
It simply does not have the kind of stability for me to lay out that kind of money (anything over $100 had better be worth it, since I can get a fairly stable OS for free).
However my wife wants windows, so we get the consumer version to save a buck.
In my book NT4 is not incomparably better. It is better. But from my experience the diference in the down time (a factor of about (nt crashes/98 crashes)~1.5) does not
justify the difference in price (about ~2 or more). [Same hardware with same software installed].
---
RobK
Why are you expecting masses of spangly new goodness?
Because MS expects me to lay out a
significant chunk of change for them.
Nothing major has been added (IE could be installed seperately) because nothing major was missing (or broken (to be polite) like the linux VM) in the first place
Hmmmm, let's see stabilty and security were definately missing in my book.
Finally:Yes, the old VM wasn't that hot. But look at it this way. With Linux I get my bugfixes/redesigns for free, with MS I have to lay out $89+ every year to two years for them.
Plus, With Linux, if it's broke, I can fix the durned thing myself.
It doesn't take a economist to figure this one out. There is a large value to being free.
---
RobK
Name 10 improvements from win95-winME.
Name 10 improvements from NT3.51-Win2000(this one is much, much easier)
These have to be substation improvements, like the ones the original poster pointed out for Linux.
(in other words "Supports USB" doesn't cut it).
---
RobK
These changes definately needed to be made. I'm a long time VB developer, and there are many, many issues in VB that need to be fixed. I do think the timing is poor, user tolerance with MS is very low right now. (Personally, I've been trying to get out of the VB trap for a while.)
---
RobK
Points 1-4 already exist in Java, as many other people have already pointed out.
.Net looks worse than a wash, you gain a little by using it,but lose even more. Infact, you might want to hire some coders to move you vb apps to say.... java since you'd have to re-write them anyway, and previous versions of VB won't be supported for very long.
/., if I am inadvertently spreading FUD, I apologize. Please post polite corrections, thank you.]
The remaining issues are only of interest if you already have a lot invested in those very specific technologies. And for that matter, you have to balance the ASP improvements vs. the through trashing they gave VB. Very basic VB concepts (like variants) no longer work under VB.Net, which will prevent a lot of people from "upgrading." (my source on this is the VB.Not homepage which was taken down, but may still be accessible via google's cache. The VB.Not homepage was started by a MS MVP, and apparently he may have been pressured to take it down.)
To me
[All of this was garnered from various articles on C|Net, linuxtoday and
---
RobK
Yes, but look at the stellar heights that
they were at. There was no sane reason that VA should have been trading at 900%+ it's IPO price. Even the most pro-MS(and pro-Linux) analysts have conceded that this is a normal stock adjustment for a stock that was majorly overvalued.
In other words, wait another year and the prices will bounce back up.
It is also highly unlikely that it's only linux stocks that have dropped that much. In a bear market like this, the price drops will fall along a bell curve. You might want to go to your library and check out a few books on how the stock market works. It's not nearly as simple as you seem to think.
While currently all of Microsoft's competitors are doing poorly (look at Apple stock!), that clearly is an indication that wall street sees Microsoft as the "safer" bet. As opposed to two years ago when they were seen as the _only_ safe bet in the tech industry. The anti-trust trial, Linux, the resurgance of Apple, the newly found balls at Sun and Oracle all have made the entire tech industry seem like less of a sure bet. Currently there is no clear "winner", even though it is very obvious that for the first time in 25 years, MS is on the defensive. Linux of course would seem the least safe bet because no body has tried to make money this way before. Given the untested business plan (from wall street's perspective) and the bearish market, I'm suprised Linux stocks aren't trading lower!
---
RobK
So anyone who uses Linux on their main
box is a zealot?
Hey GUYS!!! The weather channel are a bunch of zealots! Go get'em.
A statement like yours belies a total lack of maturity. There are a great deal of analogies I could make but the all boil down to this.... History has shown time and time again that pre-judging large groups of people is not mature.
---
RobK
Oh yeah, and Hotmail runs off Exchange now. But I guess a 1,000 user network is probably way bigger than that.
And would you perchance know how many boxes they've added to withstand the load? Or what the average uptime for the hotmail boxes was before the transition or after? Or whether the users feel their user experience has improved as a result of the transition to Exchange?
A statement such as this is meaningless unless you take into account the resources, stability and user exerpeince. If MS spent $5M to transition over, brought in 5,000 boxes, add 150% to their IT staff and the user experience stayed the same, then the exchange transition is a failure. Plain and simple. If on the other hand, they used fewer boxes, the system became more stable and the user experience remained the same, it would be a success.
The fact is that we don't know and microsoft isn't telling.
---
RobK
Yes, I know about Chillisoft.
That is not what the guy was talking about.
He specifically said that it would
be an official MS product.
---
RobK
Hmmmm...
I remember when I went to the "training seminar" [a misnomer, it was a marketing pitch] for
Visual InterDev 1.0 in Pittsburgh, the Microsoft speaker swore up and down that activex, MTS, and ASP support was "just around the corner" for solaris, linux and macintosh....
While they may have straightened up, I would take such claims with a large grain of salt.
---
RobK
However, since you posted this,
the gap continues to narrow according
to CNN. Gore has been "finding"
votes even in heavily republican counties.
Now you can argue that it's just that
democrats are stuffing the ballots faster
than republicans... Which frankly
is what I think is going on. Personally
given all the accusations on both sides each
state that was with 10,000 votes should
re-cast their ballots. It would probably
cost Gore the election, but I think it's only
fair.
You can view the by county results at
foxnews.com
that bastion of the liberal press.
A Gore Voter in NC,
---
RobK
One of the counties published a +400 for Gore because one of the the official forgot to count 400+ votes on election night.
It has since been retracted. (The county apparently wants to make sure that these 400+ votes didn't appear in a questionable manner). It looks like the editor saw one article(to create the headline) but the retraction forced them to change the content....
At least that would be my guess.
---
RobK
Um, I'm a he.
---
RobK
I know this is a troll, but...
Have you _used_ 2.4?
Have you taken advantage of the multi-threaded TCP/IP stack? The USB support? The improved VM?
To say that this isn't helping those who choose
to run Linux at home is riduculous. That's
like saying that rack-and-pinion suspension
or power steering has no place in a consumer car.
Look at the feature list, if it's not what you want... keep running 2.2 or BSD or Mac or Windows or whatever. But the way it stands now, you better change your clothes, because your ignorance is showing.
---
RobK
What?
I use windows, mac and linux. I was
addressing a specific point that this
person made. I made a _suggestion_ because
s/he see,ed to be looking for something.
I was trying to help. I am not a zealot,
just a good samaritian. If you can't
understand, then maybe you
should point the zealot accusation elsewhere.
I would sugest looking in the mirror.
---
RobK
Because SPAM is much more intrusive
than a TV add.
Each message comes in and takes a small part
of your hard-drive space and time. It would
as each producer of each tv ad came into
your house and took a single grape and a single small slice of cheese.
While each grape or slice of cheese doesn't cost much, the collective mountain of foodstuffs
would be quite expensive.
I added up the sum of the cose of HD space and
time I wasted on spam once (took an average week and projected it out over a year). It came to
something like 1 day(deleting my junk folder repeatedly) and about $15,000(obviously the space was deleted and reused) in HD space.....
And I'm very careful who get's my home address. (I have about 3 different spam addresses though.)
---
RobK
4) Freebsd and the like make heavy inroads in the server area. I'm still waiting for a distro of linux to install on a server that doesn't require gigs of drive space. Yea, I know you can do min installs and then install what you need, but xxxBSD just seems cleaner to install. And you have to love the ports.
Have you heard of ZIPslack? It a Slackware. It's designed to be loaded from a zip drive. I think that will satisfy your needs.
RobK
---
RobK
How the _hell_ is this
off topic? I was directly
responding to the arguements
the guy put forward.
It's too late now(no one is reading
this thread) but that is pure
unabashed bullshit.
---
RobK
USB and Firewire solve different
problems. Much like serial
and parrallel, they are not in competition.
If you need high speed DV access, use firewire.
If you need low speed(relatively) access to
printers, mice, keyboards, scanners or removable media, use usb.
I don't see any point where the two over lap. So
in that case saying USB is "kicking the crap" out
of firewire is like saying "serial is kicking the
crap out of parrallel."
And btw, as others have pointed out neither
is free speech or free beer.
---
RobK
Gee, compare that to the number
of Christians that died/commited
suicide at Jonestown.
Does that prove that Christianity(sp? sorry,
I'm not Christian) is eeeeveeel? No, it proves that in any large group
there will be a mentally unstable
sub-group that may do things the
larger group will call reprehensible.
BTW, do you have references for all
of those deaths? Newspaper articles, anything?
I'd be interested in seeing how avid they really were.
---
RobK
Many? There have been one or
two reported cases, of
previously distrubed individuals
commiting henious acts.
However, there has never been
any conclusive proof that occurences
of said sort are higher in the role-playing
community than amongst the regulars. There
have been a few studies that show a lower
occurance of violence amongst role-players...
but they did have some questionable aspects
to them.
Even for those few sick individuals who
did commit some horrible act, you can
not that they would or wouldn't
have done these things w/o exposure to
role-playing games.
---
RobK
It may be considered the height of objectivity that
you as a conservative find NPR to liberal while
I has a "card-carrying" liberal find it to conservative.
That's usually a good sign of objectivity.
RobK
---
RobK
Linus turns down _lots_ of patches. Lots and lots and lots of patches.... some of them end up being
part of commercial distros anyway.
I can fully understand him not accepting patches that are going to end up being a _lot_ of work to satisfy less the 1% of his "customers." [either as a maintainance issue or initial reworking of the infrastructure.] In terms of effort spent, it may simply not be worth it when the people who make these machines can easily make their own kernel. People have (for example) been using the devfs patch for quite a while and it only just got into the kernel in 2.4. I don't remember any conspiracy theories about any of the thousands of other patches Linus turned down...
Also, it could just be that the thought it was too late in the 2.4 development cycle for such a big addition.......
---
RobK
Give me some facts to back this up please. I'm
not interested in your random assertions.
I gave you some places to start looking for what the
thought process is on the kernel mailing lists.
If you really believe this, why don't you fork the
code and maintain a big iron kernel on your own?
It's your right under the GPL and there is nothing Linus could possibly do to stop you. _If_ this is Linus goal (which I don't believe for an instant... I think it's much more likely you have some kind of agenda), we can just say "So Long and Thanks for all the Code" to Linus and take Linux back. That is the beauty of Open Source code....
---
RobK